


[Remix/Rewrite] Mnemosyne

by Night-Mare (Aoife)



Series: Time Travel Fix-it Fics [1]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Aria is Reborn's Daughter, Author Hit the post-Byakuran Reset Button a bit Hard, Fix-It Using Quasi-Canonical Method(s), Multi, POV Aria (Reborn!), POV Dino (Reborn), POV Third Person Limited, Post-Anime, Rated for Dino's Language, Time Travel Fix-It, Unreliable Narrator(s), Xanxus is Enrico's Son
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:42:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27632920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aoife/pseuds/Night-Mare
Summary: Yuni tries something a little different to solve their problems.
Relationships: Aria & Dino & Xanxus (Reborn!), Dino & his Guardians (Reborn!)
Series: Time Travel Fix-it Fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1624318
Comments: 129
Kudos: 205





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Restricted Work] by [Night-Mare (Aoife)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aoife/pseuds/Night-Mare). Log in to view. 



> So. An experiment. I keep circling back to Mnemosyne, wanting to write more of it, but I get annoyed with my old writing, and can't settle into the story I was trying to tell properly. Like I've done with a few other stories, I'm going to start by editing the existing material (and tweaking it in places), and hope that breaks the block I'm dealing with.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Things that will become important later:
> 
> Without a set birthdate for Byakuran, I've decided he and Tsuna share Tsuna's - the importance of Dino's age at the beginning is that his memories start to trickle back the day they're both conceived.
> 
> Xanxus is a Vongola, he's just not the Ninth's bastard; I've also de-aged him slightly to match Dino and Squalo.
> 
> Aria's age is given as somewhere in the late twenties to early thirties range in the 'present' on the wiki, but women can look the same age from their late teens to their early forties, so I've de-aged her to be within a year or so of Dino and Xanxus's ages because it made an idea work better.
> 
> For reference, ages approximate ± 6mths (when Aria, Dino & Xanxus enter the Academy):
> 
> Byakuran & Tsuna - 2  
> Xanxus - 9  
> Aria, Dino & Squalo - 10  
> Isabella - 13  
> Valentino - 14  
> Federico - 15  
> Massimo - 17  
> Iemitsu - 27  
> Enrico - 28

He’s almost seven when he wakes for the first time, panting from what he _really_ hopes is a nightmare. 

(There had been a little girl his own age with a poison sweet smile wearing the Sky Pacifier, and then there are flashes of brutal and bloody battles, of a Pegasus with Sky Flames for its mane and wings that nuzzled his neck, and an adopted little brother who looked a lot like a brunette clone of Vongola Primo. Which made no sense, but dreams often don’t.)

He crawls into his big sister’s bed - Val had been allowed his own room the previous year, but Isabella was still in the nursery with him - and she hugs him close; her presence is enough to let him fall asleep again. 

In different circumstances, he’d forget about the nightmare. But the dreams continue, and his mean big sister moves out of the nursery, leaving him to stare at the ceiling and remember the details every time he wakes up panting from the god awful nightmares. (He tells the family chaplain, a Rain, about his weirdly vivid dreams, and the man sighs, and tells him stories of Sky gifts; he’s not sure why, but he is grateful that he believes him that there’s something strange going on. His father also arranges for there to be a night guard in the nursery, a young Lightning he thinks he recognises from his dreams, in case it’s a Mist trying something.)

It takes him several more weeks of nightmares before he learns the little girl’s name - she’s Yuni, and ‘remembers’ her murmuring in his ear just before she steps into the arms of a blond Lightning, that she needs him to _remember everything_ for her. That she’ll _always_ be too young to really change anything, and that the others all have gifts that’ll get tangled up in these memories without someone else - him - acting as a catalyst. 

He wakes up from _that_ dream with Sky Flames dancing over his skin, his Flames abruptly Active. His intuition compels him to hide the Activation; he’s not sure he manages, especially not with the Lightning in the schoolroom less than six feet from his bedroom door, but he does. 

The dreams keep pouring over him, night after night, until he’s left with eyes rimmed with bruising and worried siblings and those same newly Active Flames now fighting his attempts to corral them. They flicker and dance beneath his skin and at the back of his eyes and that he does his best to conceal them; he doesn’t want to acknowledge that ‘mere’ dreams have sent him Flame Active, might make him his Familiga’s heir. But he does greedily accept all the hugs he’s offered by his siblings; something about the dreams makes him miss them far more than he should given the circumstances, but he hasn’t ‘remembered’ why, yet, and he’s not sure he wants to; not with how _real_ the dreams feel.

But they’re just dreams. He tells himself that, over, and over and over again, until they offer him some potentially verifiable names, like those of the other Skies that feature in them. He asks his father careful, artless questions, using every bit of the diplomacy he remembers from the ‘dreams’ - he refuses to consider them anything other than dreams, _but_. The current Giglio Nero heiress is Aria; she has no siblings or cousins, but her mother does carry the Arcobaleno pacifier of the Sky. His father has no idea who the Gesso might be, and when he tries another name, only to find that there are only three Vongola boys, all of whom are older than him and that his father hasn’t heard anything about a fourth and none of the Vongola boys look like Ricardo, let alone Giotto, he gives up.

They _had_ to be dreams. They _had_ to be. Even if they’d given him his Flames. He could pretend one of his episodes of clumsiness had done _that_. (He wasn’t sure that one of them _hadn’t_. He’d concussed himself falling out of the bed at least twice in the past year, which was he doubted he was getting out of the nursery before he turned twelve.)

He was the youngest child, not the _heir_ , and yet he’d been commanding Cavallone men in some of those dreams. They _couldn’t_ be true memories; not with his siblings still alive. He was already too clumsy for his father to decide to bypass his older children even if they remained latent; he hadn’t even tried to teach him to ride yet, despite Val and Isabella having their own mounts. (And the fees for an Arcobaleno’s services were too high to waste on tutoring a useless younger son, so that _couldn’t_ be a memory of an Arcobaleno riding on his shoulder.)

But even with his denials, the nightmares keep coming thick and fast, and detailed, and he now _knows_ far too much about the way that the Giglio Nero’s visions work - information that would have never been let out of the Family if there wasn’t something odd going on - and he _understands_ the Vongola Hyper Intuition, its limits and its strengths in the same way. 

(His great-grandmother had been a rare Giglio-Nero second child, so it was possible, he supposed, that that was why he was having ~~visions~~ dreams? But Yuni had implied that the whole reason that he could dream was that he hadn’t had a gift like the Vongola’s - or the Giglio Nero’s - for it to get tangled up with.)

But before he can dismiss the dreams entirely, can shove them back into the same box he keeps any number of other thoughts about things he doesn’t want to think about (Mama’s death, Papa’s work), he gets dragged along to Federico di Vongola’s birthday party. 

He’s the youngest one there (shouldn’t _be_ there, not really; the invite had been for Val, but his father was clearly trying to make a point to Don Vongola), but his understanding of the Hyper Intuition allows him to _win a game of hide and seek_ against two Active Vongola Skies. He almost fails to pass off as a fluke, but no-one’s ever told him what the gift of the Cavallone Skies is. Perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised, given his father’s Latent status; but he pretends he ‘felt’ them hunting him, allowing him to change his hiding place to evade detection and while the Ninth gives him an odd look - his clumsiness is, humiliatingly, already well known - no one interrogates him further; he assumes they think it’s just Flame sensitivity, or the Cavallone gift he’s never learned about.

And then the first of the absolutely verifiable dreams comes _true_. The Vongola Ninth brings home a street kid, with blood red eyes, a temper and active Flames and proclaims him his illegitimate son. And he has to accept that at least some of the dreams might be memories of things still to happen.

Some of the dreams, the memories say the Ninth lies; others that the man speaks truly, but not the whole of the truth. There’s a strong undertone of ‘all this has happened before, and all this is happening again’ and he already hates that phrase; what’s the point of him being traumatised if everything has already been decided? 

He says ‘No’, it will not; he will not allow his siblings to die - not even if their deaths would make him heir, would make using the Familiga’s assets easier; nor is he willing to leave his cute and highly fluffy little otouto to suffer under the Seal - it’s not been placed, not yet, and if he has his way it won’t be. And he knows enough about both sides of the zero-point ice from other dreams to want to avert Xanxus’s fate, too.

The more he tries to change things, the more resistant to being changed they seem to become. At least the major events; he suspects he just hasn’t found the right lever yet - the small things do change when he pushes them. 

In the end, he breaks into his Father’s office - his sister is happy to help with what she thinks is a little bit of mischief, distracting their father and his men long enough for him to plant a few harmless surprises - and he uses the opportunity to tweak the Villa duty rotas, replacing his current bodyguards with his Romario, who is currently a teen just out of training and Niccola, who he remembers from his dreams. (It had taken a while to put together the drained and grey Lightning following Timoteo around with the vivacious Lightning who’d volunteered for nursery duties. That was something he could change, too. He’d never had a Lightning, and if he could make sure cousin Niccola was _his_ before Timoteo came calling, he wouldn’t be fed into that particular ravenous maw.)

He hopes that it’ll help with his clumsiness, especially once he allows himself the light ‘tether’ that’s the start of a Guardian Bond to both men. Even if his clumsiness _has_ saved his life, once or twice, he refuses to be as much of a liability as he remembers it making him prior to Reborn’s ~~torture~~ tutoring. With Niccola and Romario as his bodyguards, he can train and maybe if he fails to change things enough, when Reborn comes, he won’t be quite so _hopeless_.

It takes him the best part of a month to figure out how close he needs to stay to either man if he wants to minimise his clumsiness (he’s actually jealous of his dream!self; his radius is bigger than his teenage!self’s, but still tiny compared to the range of the self that Yuni had hugged) and another month after _that_ before he manages to talk his Father into sending him to one of the two feeder schools for the ‘Mafia’ Academy; it’s the one slightly further away from their home, which again takes all the diplomacy skills he can remember from the ‘dreams’ - which definitely _aren’t_ dreams, he accepts at this point - to manage. (But it’s the one he _remembers_ Squalo talking about attending prior to the Academy - his older self had been homeschooled, his clumsiness too much of a liability to allow him around other children of the mafia, some of whom had been Active and wielding edged weapons since before they’d fully mastered toddling.)

He wants to befriend Squalo earlier - and as an equal. Not that they weren’t friends before - Squalo had certainly brought him enough souvenirs from missions and being willing enough to back off when he’d demanded it - but with Romario and Niccola in tow, he can keep up with the silver-haired - currently Latent - Rain, rather than just being the class joke. He prefers it this way; especially as his next, unnerving step, the one he’s still trying to talk himself into, is to befriend Xanxus di Vongola.

He also starts to suspect that _maybe_ his newly co-opted Guardians remember some of the future too, for some reason. He’d been expecting complaints to be directed at his Father for their ‘babysitting’ duties; looking after the clumsy and useless youngest Cavallone isn’t exactly the assignment that most up and coming foot soldiers would want. (Though maybe, just maybe they’d noticed his Sky Flames? Maybe they wanted him for what he _could_ be?)

His suspicions are confirmed when Romario’s Flames start to unfurl, starting the slow, slow shift from Latent to Active that comes with deliberate training to activate them with Niccola’s help rather than any of the more traumatic and rapid techniques. His own Flames are Active, but he’s still hoping that the part of his nightmares where he commanded the full might of the Cavallone wouldn’t come true, so he has them wrapped up impossibly tight, not letting out more than the absolute minimum necessary to maintain the tethers he’s using to keep himself half-way stable. When Romario’s join Niccola’s in being fully Active, he’ll see if his Flames want a full bond with the older mafioso - he hopes they do. He misses the _security_ and _stability_ of having Guardians.

(He sneaks into his father’s office again, makes sure that the folders with the information his father and his right hand need to catch the pair of underBosses who nearly ruined the Family are near enough to the surface that they might get looked at in time.)

Iemitsu Sawada drops out of sight for three months - he’s annoyed with himself that it takes two of those months to remember why the CEDEF head might have done so, though some of the delay has to be put down to two facts: the sheer quantity of data the dreams have dumped into his brain and that he’s not formally in the Cavallone information loop - he has to listen at keyholes and sweet talk information from his father’s men, rather than just being told, and maybe, just maybe he misses being the Boss. Just a little bit. 

But he makes himself _remember_ the price of being the Boss, and he decides that he'll approach Xanxus at the next of the interminable Mafia events he’s dragged to. His father was showing off that like the Vongola Ninth, he too had managed to sire multiple Skies, and parading his older sister beneath the Vongola boys’ noses; despite her Latency, she was a prize his jaded eyes could see Timoteo _slavering_ after. Hopefully, the man would restrain himself to offering one of his younger legitimate boys rather than himself or Enrico; his heir was _much_ older than his younger brothers.

Meeting Xanxus now, with his own Flames Active, and with them on a roughly equal footing, would make the Wrath Sky a far less intimidating creature than Xanxus at fifteen, angry and far more physically capable, had been for Reborn’s victim. Right now, Xanxus is just a scared street kid, thrown in the deep end of Flame society. 

He wishes - not for the first time - that he had his adult growth (and all of his Flames; he _will_ be the old man’s equal, but not yet) as the ‘dreams’ have rather knocked the Vongola Ninth off his pedestal, and he can see the next six years of mistakes the man makes unfolding before him. He wants nothing more than to be able to confront the leader of the Alliance, but he can’t. He can’t even get too close to the older Sky, lest the old man’s dubiously functional intuition works just well enough to figure out that he’s not _just_ the nine-year-old youngest son of the Cavallone Ninth.

(Not that he thinks the old man’s Intuition is that accurate, but he might pick up that something was wrong, and then there would be Bouche Croquant digging around in his head, and killing the Mist, using one of the methods that Mukuro had drilled into him when they were up against the Millefiore, would ring alarm bells.)


	2. Partners in Crime - POV Aria

“Mama?”

“Yes, principessa?”

"Do your visions ever _change_?

“Only when you figure out the leverage to _make_ them change. Sometimes that’s as small as a way of thinking. Sometimes -” her mother sounds almost rueful, “- sometimes, it means ritually sacrificing the most powerful Flame users available to you.”

“ _Mama_.”

“I’m guessing you haven’t done _that_ , sweetheart. Try and keep it as a last resort, sì? They’re not as much fun when they’re chibi-sized.” She sighs, and her mother looks more serious for a moment. “Other Skies can change your visions, too. We’ve managed to hide the method, but they sometimes manage it unintentionally.”

“How do I -?”

“How do you tell? You can’t, sweetheart; it’s our curse. If you do your research, you can avoid most of the pitfalls.” She eyes her chibified mother sceptically, and Luce laughs. “I said most. And it was a particularly terrible future, Aria. The seas burnt and civilisations _crumbled_. I hope you have better luck than I did.”

She hesitates for a moment and dives off the cliff with only the tiniest of regrets. “I need to be Donna, Mama. I don’t think this’ll work without me wearing our crown.”

“I wondered why I had retrieved the Rings, principessa.” She raises an eyebrow, and her mother grins at her, clearly amused by something. “My grandfather was a Vongola, one who died at the fascists’ hands; I have a measure of their intuition, buried under our gifts. It’s always a little disconcerting when it decides to pop up.”

She pulls a box out of a pocket clearly too small for it, and lays it on the table, open with two Sky Rings sat next to each other. She touches the one with the wings warily; she’s never seen her mother wear it, never seen it on her own finger in any of her visions. “I feel like I should know this ring, but it’s like the memory of how and where is skittering out of my grasp.”

“It’s kin to the pacifiers, as the Vongola Rings would be if they were unSealed. It’ll make the point more … dramatically than just the family rings. But it will make finding your own Guardians a little more urgent, principessa.” She slides the rings on, amused at the way they click together like a set of wedding bands and fit her _perfectly_. The wings spread, settling over her fingers, and the ring glows softly for a moment (she suspects it might make an entirely adequate knuckle duster). “It likes you more than it liked me, sweetheart; I only got that response days before I had to give it up in favour of this.” Her mother touches her pacifier, making it glow softly. “And if I’m fortunate, you may buy us both some time.”

* * *

Narrowing down who is causing the ripples in her visions - her future Guardians keep changing; it’s the first thing her Mama had taught her to look for, a lodestone to help her stay sane - takes _time_. Time she’s not sure that she or her Mama have. (She doesn’t _want_ to wear the pacifier. Not yet. And she’s definitely not ready to produce a Decima for the family, either!) Time she has to spend at Mafia events - strange events, where she’s by far the youngest, but bowed to by nine-tenths of those present - because that’s where a Sky capable of changing her visions _must_ be. Right? There’s nothing hinting at them being elsewhere. (She’d even asked her Mama if she thought it might be Giotto’s blood causing chaos, and she’d smiled and said this wasn’t their form of weird.)

The invitation to the ‘kiddie’ events comes almost as an insult. Almost. Except something prompts her to accept. She doesn’t find what she’s looking for at the first or the second event. Or the third. (But she knows that the person she’s looking for is at the events, too. She works her way through the Families present, methodically hunting the Sky that she wants to meet.)

She does indulge in her love of chaos, though. If the boys would think she had cooties, and the girls didn’t understand why she was armed, and their fathers bowed to her, then she could at least have _all_ the cake and make her mother’s men twitch when she vanished from their line of sight. (Perhaps the cake would lure out her prey? It would work to lure her out …)

* * *

Dino Cavallone is adorable and knows it. He’s tiny, blond, and clumsy (at least some of the time; its intermittency is what attracts her attention) and working _ridiculously_ hard to hide the fact that he’s Flame Active, knows how to use his Flames, and is _incredibly_ overpowered, compared to his siblings (and even when she compared him to the younger Vongola boys, he still came up the strongest). There’s also something else weird going on with him, but she’s not quite sure _what_.

She’s just contemplating how best to lure him in (while eating her ill-gotten gains) when he surprises her by joining her under the table she’s using as a hide and a sunshade. “You always steal the best cakes. I thought I’d see if you were willing to share?”

“… sure.” His Flames are incredibly distracting. They keep reaching out for his Guardians, his bonds there-but-incomplete, and her fingers itch for a newspaper to roll up and smack his nose with. He _has_ Guardians. He shouldn’t be so _cruel_ to them! “But in return, you have to tell me why you’re hiding your Flames, Cavalluccio?”

“I want to cuddle my otouto and raise pretty horses. If I let Papa see my Flames -”

“- you’d make a good Don, I think. I’ve seen you commanding your men, Cavalluccio.” He pulls a face and she giggles and takes a bite of her cake. “But Isabella does it better, so I won’t let your secret slip. You might want to sort out your bonds with your Guardians if you want to stay hidden though -”

He squeaks. It’s adorable.

(Too adorable. It triggers a vision, and she rides it out, strangely not at all worried about being so vulnerable in front of the other young Sky.)

He squeaks again when she hugs him. But really, it’s the only real response that she can give to that vision. It’s such a _starkly_ different vision from the other long-range ones she’s seen - her Papa, adult-sized, with a tiny Primo-clone on his hip - that Dino Cavallone _has_ to be the one changing things, despite only being her age.

“So why were you looking for me?” She sweeps the how and the why of how he was changing things under the rug for now; finding that out could wait for when they’d built trust. It was all too likely a Family ‘gift’ of some sort was involved, and they all got prickly about _those_. But him searching her out? That was intriguing. There’d been _intent_.

“I need your help.”

“With -?”

“Xanxus di Vongola and Timo’s utter incompetence.” Her eyes go wide at the casual insult to the senior Sky in the Alliance. “He’s trying to pretend to everyone Xanxus is his son, but he’s not. Not with the way his Guardians can’t soothe him. And he’s trying to pretend having taken him off the streets and into the Iron Fort is a magic fix for all the damage he's suffered from being cold and hungry and losing his Mama. And it’s wrong, and it’s _dangerous_ if his Flame is what I think it is. But no one will listen to me. They _might_ listen to you. They all pretend to, anyway.”

“Unfortunately, it really is mostly just pretence. But I have an idea -”

* * *

Xanxus di Vongola is genuinely entertaining.

Traumatised, sarcastic, in possession of a Flame that eats walls, seals and bullets, and _whip-smart_. (And she hates the gods-be-damned snatches of him encased in ice she sees whenever Timoteo di Vongola rests a hand on his shoulder and proclaims him ‘my youngest’.)

Helping Dino Cavallone socialise him, and watching the calming effect of the Cavalluccio’s Flame on the Wrath is oddly soothing. (She wonders if her new best friend will train horses in the same way in a few years; perhaps that thought is uncharitable of her, but it’s such a strong image that it _almost_ feels like a vision.) It confirms her suspicions - for the effect to be so strong, the boys were probably close cousins, making it likely Xanxus was Enrico’s son - and she contemplates how to let that particular secret slip.

(Now she knew to look, she could see the Vongola Heir twitch every time his father laid claim to his son. And she knew to send one of her Guardians for Guido, if Xanxus was melting down and Dino wasn’t around.)


	3. ... the Academy?! - POV Dino

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy something that was previously a noodle incident :D

The way Aria keeps peeking at him through her eyelashes when she thinks he isn’t looking is odd. If they’d been older, he’d have guessed that she was trying to be flirtatious, but as they weren’t, he wasn’t sure _what_ the Giglio Nero Sky was thinking.

(Aria barely featured in the dreams. Which was strange; their lands bordered on the Cavallone, and if he’d been Don, he should have been interacting with her _regularly_.)

“Voooiii!” He twitches, and his eyes flick between Aria, Xanxus and their stolen cake, trying to gauge whether to stage an introduction. Their first attempt to get Timo to allow Xanxus to attend the Academy had failed, but if the Wrath was stalking a Rain of _Squalo’s_ strength …

(He had to be strong, he’d seen him wear the Rain pacifier in one of his weirder dreams. He’d been wearing the Sun one in the same dream and he wasn’t sure what to think about _that_.)

“Dino, don’t you _dare_!” He grins at Aria and scrambles out of their hide. "He’s a menace with no volume control!” But he knows how to install volume control. Knows from his dreams that the volume is performative, the product of a fucked up home life and reinforced by its usefulness as protective colouration. (He’s dreamt of running his hands through Squalo’s hair soothingly while the swordsman sobbed silently in response to the ice where his Sky should be. Secret private memories he never wants to be true.)

A hissed litany of curses on his Family make him giggle (she doesn’t mean it; her Flames feel put upon, not enraged); Romario gives him a look that means he should probably apologise and explain just a little bit. A cursing Giglio Nero made most people flinch.

“What did you _do_ , Cavalluccio?”

“M’going to introduce Xanxus and Squalo. Aria’s seen why.” Romario shakes his head. “S’for leverage. Timo s’trying to isolate him. If he’s chasing Squalo, sending him to the Academy will be more manageable than trying to keep a street kid contained and isolated.”

“You’re too old for your own good, Dino. You could have just told me you wanted to watch the explosion.” He rubs the back of his head and tries to look innocent, and Romario laughs, Flames brushing against him curiously. “The mini!Superbi and his minder probably won’t object to the kidnapping. Want me to help you negotiate if you’re getting stuck?”

“Please. You think they’d be a good match too, then ’Maro?” His consigliere hums an affirmation. “Timo’s going to hate it.”

“You and I need to have a conversation about that tendency, Dino. Calling the senior Sky in the alliance by a diminutive without his explicit permission is a level of politics not even your little girlfriend is ready for, despite her mother’s training and the Arcobaleno stalking her.”

“She’s not my girlfriend!” He pinches his nose, knowing that he’s reacted to the wrong bit of his consigliere’s statement. Being told that an Arcobaleno was secretly watching all of your interactions with their charge _should_ have been more shocking. (He’d only clocked Viper at two of their meetings - Aria had stolen strawberry-flavoured cake, and it had disappeared rather fast.)

“… you _are_ in the process of Activating, aren’t you, Cavalluccio?” Was Romario remembering something, or had he just been watching him _that_ closely? He could see how his Rain had put the pieces together, he supposed, especially with Niccola to bounce ideas off …

“Um. Don’t tell Papa?” His consigliere’s Flames flicker, loyalties clearly divided and he brushes his own against the Rain, strengthening their bond a little. He manages to make it feel clumsy and instinctual, and ’Maro tugs him into a brief hug. “I will tell him, I promise. But he’s latent, and I don’t want him to let Timo seal me -”

“- they wouldn’t.”

“Aria saw Xanxus in _ice_. Like the Donnas used during the war.” Romario winces and crosses himself, and he wants to ask _why_. “We’re trying to stop it.”

“You’re going to be the death of me, Cavalluccio.”

“Don’t you _dare_ die for me!” His own vehemence surprises him, but then he’s watched all of his dream!self’s Guardians die for that version of him. (He doesn’t want his Future to look like that.) He realises with a twitch that - given how clear his vision was - his Flames had to be dancing in his eyes; he swallows and tucks them back into the box he’d been keeping them in. Once he has, the world goes a little muted again, and he looks up at his Rain with his best innocent grin.

“You’re not going to be able to hide forever, Cavalluccio.”

“Don’t want to hide it forever. Just ’til Aria says that Xan’s safe and maybe until ’bella’s found her Flames?” Romario shakes his head, and he leans into his Flames and their compatibility just a bit. “We were going to go fishing …?”

“Fine. We’ll go chum the waters, Boss.” ’Maro slides into place behind him, covering his back and he slides through the party space; Squalo’s volume makes hunting him easy, and tries to decide how to seduce him into following him back to his lair.

* * *

Timoteo di Vongola does not _like_ Xanxus’s fascination with Squalo. It shows in the endless parade of Rains he inflicts on his self-proclaimed youngest son.

He can’t ban Squalo from communal events, and on the two occasions he tried to stop _Xanxus_ attending, Enrico had brought him along anyway. It makes him wonder if he realises. Xanxus is his son rather than his baby brother. He’s tempted to _ask_ , but Aria intervenes every time he tries, so he drops it in favour of figuring out who he’d _dreamed_ of and in what context.

He’s so busy daydreaming (at least he _thinks_ it’s daydreaming; he’s poking one of the dream-memories, trying to figure out if it’s where he knows one of the Lightning kids in the room from) that he misses the start of the show. He _doesn’t_ miss the abruptly heavy Rain and Mist Flames; they make him sway, and he has to avoid the urge to disrupt them.

(He does reach out and steady ’Maro with his Flames as subtly as he can. Letting _his_ own succumb to that maelstrom is so anathematic to who he is that he can’t do it. Even if it will give ’Maro more evidence that he’s actually Active rather than just Activating.)

Aria glows, star bright, in the centre of the room, stood in front of Xanxus, barely a foot away from Don Vongola and a clearly dazzled Enrico, and he can’t hear what she’s saying properly, but she _feels_ like his dreams of Reborn in a righteous Rage. And then Don Vongola’s Flames rise to match Aria’s, and she _snarls_ , the winged Ring on her finger glowing fiercely.

(Mammon is infinitely more subtle than Croquant Bouche.)

“If you keep on how you are, you’ll outlive all of your sons.” Aria’s voice is sibilant. “Should I name you Kronos? If I do, it’ll stick. Or maybe one of your sons might be better named Oedipus?”

“Perhaps I should be glad their mothers are dead.” The Ninth shakes his head, as if he’s trying to disperse an illusion, or shift a thought. “And you think Xanxus at the Academy is the solution, Donna Giglio Nero?”

“In the visions that I’ve had, the one constant is that Xanxus never received formal schooling. Perhaps changing _that_ might change the future, sì?” The Vongola Ninth gives her a strange look, and Aria smiles, slow and devious. “I mean I could try Mama’s solution, instead -”

The Flames in the room twitch, and he wonders if she has more than one of the Arcobaleno watching over her.

The answer is yes. Reborn appears beside her with a put upon expression. “- do _not_ joke about that, principessa. Just shut up and listen to the new Giglio Nero Sky, Timo. Unlike Luce, she’s actually trying something other than the nuclear option.” Reborn toes Enrico, a bright pulse of Sun Flames making the pacifier on his chest glow and breaking the ‘dazzle’ Timo had used, and the Vongola Heir moans and rolls over, Flames flaring in relief; one of the men previously slumped by the wall hurries to Enrico’s side and glares, eyes purple, at Timo. “Learn to stand up to your father, and I _might_ consider being your Sun when Luce fades, Enrico. Your Flames have begun to rather … appeal.” He shivers. He wasn’t sure if he was entirely comfortable with the idea of the Vongola Heir appealing to _Reborn_.

(His dream!self had been seriously disconcerted when Reborn had expressed a similar interest in his fluffy otouto.)

* * *

He hadn’t _intended_ to enter the Academy this year. But then he also hadn’t expected for Timoteo to send Xanxus straight to the Academy ‘proper’ rather than to one of the feeder schools or its lower school to get used to formal schooling. (He knows what the man’s trying to do; he wants his son’s bastard to sink, and beg to go back to being privately tutored.)

Luckily Reborn’s amused by his daughter’s scheming.

(He’s not actually clear on whether the two of them _know_ they’re actually related. He’s torn as to whether he should ask, especially because the only reason he’s so sure is his dreams.)

Or so he assumes by the fact that he, Aria and Squalo had found themselves _also_ suddenly attending the Academy, albeit in an oddball way his dream!self had vaguely remembered being told about. Despite, in his case, being almost a year too young for the lower school and four years too young for the Academy ‘proper’. He’d struggled the first time through but this time comes a little easier, more revision than anything else. The Giglio Nero Skies have always been precocious (he suspects they’ve figured out a Sky trick to compensate for the fact they get sucked into being Arcobaleno Skies a _lot_ ) so Aria smiles and their classmates _scowl_ as she stays consistently in the top three.

But _Xanxus_. Xanxus doesn’t have those advantages. Xanxus is a self-taught street brat, still more than a little confused by the two of them and their interest in him, albeit willing enough to play along as they actually explain the things he’s missing. And don’t tease him about it. He’s actually far smarter than either of them - even with all the knowledge his dreams provide him, the only subject he stays consistently ahead of Xanxus is Mathematics & Finances.

(Which given his ‘dream’ self apparently had to drag the Cavallone back up from close to bankruptcy and had been some kind of financial wizard is a relief.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this fic, the Academy is a very specialised scuola secondaria di secondo grado, also known as scuola superior - normally for 14-19 year olds. Yes, Timoteo's throwing Xanxus in the deep end, though at least partially it's because while the elementary and middle school instructors are Flame Aware, it's only the Academy's teachers that tend to be Flame Active enough to survive a pissed off baby Sky. They're in a special class for under-age Flame Actives. Dodging and self-awareness is prerequisite to teach them :D


	4. A Wild Ride / To Ride Ira - POV Dino

One of the most significant advantages to the ‘dreams’ ... 

(And he’s still calling them that because he doesn’t want to accept all of what they show as memories. That would mean accepting that one of their own men was willing to stampede one of their ‘feral’ herds to kill his brother and that was a _horrifying_ thought. It would mean watching his sister die from what was apparently an ectopic pregnancy. And it would mean facing a freaking _apocalypse_. Complete with burning oceans.)

... is that his ‘dream’ self had both picked up several useful skills _and_ got over at least three of his biggest fears while being, uh, tutored by Reborn. One of which was his longstanding (and highly embarrassing) fear of horses; that phobia had actually worsened over the course of the dream-series. (Even before the dreams clumsiness and horses and siblings who made it all look effortless had had him tied in knots to the point where he’d refused his Papa’s attempts to teach him to ride.)

The dream in which his brother died, hadn’t helped, and, of course, it had come far earlier in the sequence (hopefully that didn’t mean he’d have to try and avert that _soon_!) than the one, where Reborn had harassed a teenage version of himself into the saddle. He’d fallen off the horse in question a lot, to start with, but it was better than being shot at, and by his late-teens, he’d clearly _adored_ riding. (And by the start of the freaking apocalypse, he’d been riding a _pegasus_!)

But his _soul_ hurt and riding was the only one of the generally acceptable - and permitted to a ten-year-old - ways of soothing the ache he had available to him. (His dream-self’s vices scared him a little bit; the idea of possessing a Cloud so utterly _terrifying_ as Kyōya and deliberately baiting him into sparring was bizarre. Even if Kyōya was incredibly affectionate afterwards; the Cloud routinely used his dream-self as a place to nap, and from everything he’d been told, that was unusual.)

A Cloud to spar with was a long, long way in the future, though: his dream-self was in his mid-twenties when he’d started _that_ vice. Which was why he was here, in the stables, using his Flames to help him talk the newest apprentice in the yard into putting the tack on his father’s new stallion; it’s probably a little cruel of him to trick the boy, but none of the _established_ stablehands would have allowed him out on the horse he’d asked for. 

(They had all gotten so used to his clumsiness, his ability to trip over thin air - even he has, though Romario and Niccola’s stabilising influence was helping a lot - that they wouldn’t dream of putting him on anything but the most docile of the ponies. With the way he’d shied away from his father’s attempts to coax him into at least trying the ponies, the _stablemaster_ would have probably refused to saddle a horse for him at all. In fairness, the lad he’d chosen to approach had actually managed to mix him up with Valentino! Which given his older brother was dark to his blond, and a foot taller than him was sort of worrying.)

He’s still not sure exactly why he’s so convinced this is a good idea, but he needs _something_ , he’s run out of other ideas, and he’s _fairly_ sure he can borrow his dream-self’s riding skills. He’s borrowed other skills using the method he’s planning to use - each attempt a little more ambitious, another tiny blow against his ability to pretend the dreams weren’t _true_ \- but he _needs_ the quiet companionship of the type of riding his dreams have shown him. And he misses Scuderia - like he’d miss a limb. 

(He at least knew the names of the scientists that had been involved in making the box animals, thanks to the time he’d spent annoying Kyōya. Who was another person that he missed, along with his little brother. Perhaps when he finally let on he was Active to his father, he’d use the traditional allowance to invest in box animal research? That felt right to the instincts that he relied on to stay ahead of Xanxus in Mathematics & Finance, anyway.)

He barely manages to scramble up into the saddle without annoying the horse; the dappled-grey stallion stamps and shifts as he settles into the saddle. The lack of previous experience is a net benefit, though; it means that he doesn’t have to deal with over-writing his body’s instincts, but rather just has to force his current muscle memory to (mostly) match the muscle memory from the dreams, but that had proved to be easy enough given the Harmony Aspect of Sky Flames. 

(He might not have been the strongest of Skies, but that just meant that his older self had apparently spent his time figuring out all sorts of tricks to do what his peers had done with brute force; Kyōya had apparently been very motivating as well given the Cloud’s perpetual desire to ‘bite him to death’. He was _sure_ he was missing a layer of the phrase’s meaning.) 

He just had to force the memories on his muscles; he knew he could ride, knew he could ride well, and it was just a case of making his body remember how. The effort leaves him panting, the horse beneath him prancing in response. 

(He lets his Flame flicker on his forehead briefly. Allowing the stable boy to see that, to be the one that got to report he was Flame Active to his father was a partial apology for the amount the other kid was going to get yelled at for giving hopeless Dino his father’s unbroken prize Stallion to ride.)

He stands up in his stirrups and settles himself back into his saddle with a more appropriate seat - he’d been doing a remarkable impression of a sack of potatoes, before he forced the change - and _springs_ the stallion. Ira takes the opening, and he laughs (he suspects a little manically) as the stallion breaks into a gallop and his body adjusts like he’s been riding longer than he’s been walking.

Ira’s not as much fun to ride as Scuderia, but that’s like saying a piece of chocolate isn’t as nice as a glass of smooth whisky; his dream-self’s box animal and the stallion are two completely different creatures. And he - Ira - was a gorgeous horse to ride, worth every lira he suspected that his father had spent on him, and he was fairly sure, based on his dreams that Ira was the sire of the horse that would become Scuderia. The stallion revelled in his Flames, and the easy harmony makes it so he barely needed to think before Ira responded to him. 

He rides Ira for the rest of the day, exploring the estate, merging the dreams of doing this, of beating the bounds, into actual memories, the two of them successfully dodging his father’s guards. Which given that the stallion he was riding was so close to being white that ‘grey’ was an insult, and both of them had Sky Flames dancing over their skins said that they needed a hell of a lot of training. (There are a few moments where their harmony almost fails; mostly when they stumble across sites he recognises from the battle-dreams rather than the peaceful ones.)

It’s almost dusk when he rides back into the stableyard, and he’s not surprised when his father and his consiglieres are waiting for him. He almost turns Ira back around, but that would be behaviour unfitting for a Boss and Reborn would - no Reborn. No Reborn, and the memories of his mentor’s death shoves itself forward in his head and nearly undoes the calm that riding Ira had won him. 

“Why didn’t you say something, Dino?” His father’s voice is calm, and he doesn’t know how to respond. His Flames, on the other hand, do: they dance over his skin and over Ira, orange wisps that glow softly in the evening gloom.

His father isn’t as frail as he remembers him being, can still lift him down from Ira’s back almost effortlessly, and the hug he’s snatched up into is unexpected, and he hugs his father back, desperately. He hated the man for dying and leaving him with the messy burden he had in his dreams, but he was still his father, and he loved him. 

“I’m ‘hopeless’ Dino.” His Papa’s latent Flames hiss and crackle, and he briefly entertains a thought that his Papa’s about to go Active. “But even though I’m hopeless, Sky Flames mean that people would push you to name me heir and I don’t _want_ to be. Isabella would be a better choice than I am!”

“Who - no. It doesn’t matter. You’re not hopeless. Especially not if you can ride my stallion like that.” He’ll take that. It’s better than the memories; even his father had called him hopeless by the time the man was dying of cancer, had been pessimistic about him surviving Reborn’s hands, and had honestly expected the Family just to be absorbed by the Vongola under his sister’s son. “I am a little envious, Dino. I never did get my Flames to Activate.” There was a wistful edge to his father’s voice, and the man’s consiglieres (his uncles really - or they should have been at least) eye each other in a way that suggested to him - from memories of similar interactions with Romario - that the two men were going to get his father drunk later. Both of them were latent too, but there was a bond there. “We’ll have to organise training for you.”

… maybe his father asking to include him in Xanxus’s training would actually force the Ninth to take Xanxus’s training more seriously? Meditation had helped his other self with his instincts, and he wondered if anyone had bothered to teach the Wrath the skill.

His consigliere - or the man who would be - skidded into the stableyard, breathless from what he suspected was a sprint across most of the Villa. “What were you _thinking_ Dino?” The interjection comes from a breathless Romario, and he feels a little bit guilty for making him worry, but he had badly needed the peace that came from riding Scuderia’s sire. And the absolute knowledge that he could claim his dream-self’s skills if he needed to. “Sorry for interrupting, Boss -”

He flares his Flames and is rewarded with Romario’s finally fully manifesting, and he allows himself to do what he’s wanted to do for the past two years. He launches himself at his right hand and cuddles him the way only a ten-year-old could get away with, a possessive “ _mine_ ,” on his lips. (He’d tackle claiming Niccola _later_.)

His father and his right and left hands laugh; he assumes it’s at the flustered look on Romario’s face, but he was too busy doing the mental equivalent of a cat rolling around in catnip, to care. He’d missed the calm that was his Rain’s touch, and perhaps Xanxus would stop looking at him like he was trying to poach Squalo now. He and Squalo wouldn’t have made a good Sky-Guardian match, whereas Squalo and Xanxus were like a match made in _Hell_. He’d have said Heaven, but the two of them would get kicked out within minutes - or stage a coup. (Hopefully more successfully than the one he remembered!)

“I think we need to have a discussion about Flame etiquette, Cavalluccio.” His father’s voice carried a reprimand, but he had his Rain _finally_ , and he didn’t care! Maybe he had been a _bit_ naughty about claiming him, but Romario had been his for _decades_. He shakes his head and stuffs the memories of being thirty-two - and twenty years with his Rain at his back - back into the box ‘labelled dream, not real’. His Papa turns to his Rain, and his voice shifts. “Romario, my apologies. It seems you have some new duties; and Dino, for pulling _that_ stunt, _I_ will be choosing your bodyguards while your Romario is brought up to speed with what it means to be a Guardian.” He growls, surprising himself at the reaction to potentially being separated from his Rain. “Growl at me again like that, Dino Cavallone, and I will find the cruellest possible tutor for your newly demonstrated skill; Colonello springs to mind -”


	5. Rings - POV Dino

“Sit.” He takes a seat in the indicated chair and his papa circles around his big desk, sitting in the (sinfully) comfortable chair behind it. The silence grows heavy, and he fidgets, wishing that Romario and Angelo had followed them into the room rather than peeling off to have a discussion elsewhere. “I suspect, given what you said, you’re going to try to refuse my request, cavalluccio.”

He twitches, and his father places a box he’s watched his dream-self sort through on three separate occasions on his desk. It’s only the fact he _knows_ it contains more than just the primary set of Family Rings that allows him to stay relatively calm. 

“Dino.” The wealth of affection infused into his name startles him; between the dreams (the relationship between his dream-self and his - their? - father between his current age and his fourteenth birthday had been _very_ messy, and he had almost twenty years of memories of grieving for and hating his father in nearly equal measure), his clumsiness, and the way he’s been trying to minimise any suspicion, he’s not sure he’s heard that level of affection in his papa’s voice since his mama’s death. “I heard what you said, Dino. But you’re Active, and if we don’t make it clear that you’re a valued part of the Family, you’ll be a target as soon as people realise that you are. So I’m offering you a choice, Dino; the Ring and combat training, or homeschooling. You’ll be too tempting a target on your own and untrained.”

“A … target?” He suspects he knows what issue his father was talking around, but … well, other bits of his dreams were proving to be real, and he’d like his father to _do_ something about the Estraneo rather than just stay on the defensive. (It would prove that he wasn’t the man that his dream-self wanted him to _think_ he was.) His father looks old for a moment; the idea of losing him in the next four years (especially given the other deaths he’s dreamed of) abruptly doesn’t seem so unthinkable any more. 

“One of the other old Families is going off the rails, Cavalluccio, in a way that’s deeply unsettling. It’s why you’ve all been kept close or have multiple escorts when you’re away from our lands.” He twitches at his father’s words, and the man sits up in his chair. “You’ve heard something, Dino. Haven’t you?”

He hesitates, his Flames flickering and his father sits there, patiently, waiting for him to make his decision. “You know I’ve been having nightmares, Papa. Some of them have been sort of prophetic but not in a way that sounds familiar to Aria.” He bites his lip. “Do you remember me asking about the Vongola boys a few years ago? Whether there was one my age?” 

His father inclines his head, and he’s suddenly incredibly grateful he’s not trying this with his otouto. 

“I started paying attention to the nightmares when Don Vongola introduced Xanxus as his son, and he looked _just_ like the boy I’d been dreaming about.” He bounces gently in his seat, and this is probably a _very_ bad idea, but then so had been his ride on Ira. He leans forward and brushes Flame covered fingers over an engraving on the desk. If he’s _right_ (and he is right; he _knows_ he is) … he feels the tug, the drain far harsher than he’s ever dreamed it would be, and then the Villa shimmers into view on top of the desk and his papa _stares_ at him.

“How -”

“I dreamed about it. And if you’re worried about someone stealing us, it should help, right? I don’t think I need to do more than charge it -”

“Dino, child, _how_ did you know how to do that? I knew that it was _possible_ , I just didn’t know _how_ to make it do that. And yes, yes it will help. Quite a lot, actually.” 

“I told you. I dreamed about it.” He makes a face. “I dreamed about figuring it out in order to defend the Villa against the Carcassa while my tutor held a gun to my head, actually.” His father gives him a look that he’s not quite sure how to interpret, and he slumps “… that’s precisely why I _didn’t_ say anything. I’m hopeless Dino.” He knows it’s a futile request, and that he burnt that fort when he took Ira for a ride, but he has to ask: “Do we have to tell everyone I’m Flame Active? Nobody saw me -”

“Dino, most of the core members of the Family saw you on your little ride.” He twitches. “Admittedly, most of them promptly decided that the most obvious explanation was that Tiberia’s ghost had come back to beat the bounds for us because the Estraneo are on the move, but it’ll only take most of them a couple of weeks to realise it was you, Cavalluccio. Especially if you go anywhere near the herd, or have to defend yourself: your Flames are your only real weapon right now.” His father’s lips quirk into a genuine smile. “We even had two foals demolish the breakfast buffet this morning, and we haven’t had that problem since your Bisnonna died, Dino.” He giggles; he can’t help it. He adored the dreams that showcased the foals’ mischievousness, and he dearly hoped he would get to witness some of it in real life; a horsey alarm clock _appealed_. 

He reaches for the ring case, and his Papa allows him to take the box; he opens it carefully and trails his fingers over the sets of Rings inside. (The Cloud Rings made his gut clench; the moment when the Cavallone Cloud Ring shattered was etched in his memory.) He bypasses the set his Papa should be wearing, and the gaudy set his Nonno had worn before his Bisnonna had handed over the reins and their official Rings for an older, subtler set. He thinks they were last used by his Bisnonna and her set during the War, but he’s not _sure_ ; he just knows that they’re old and powerful (and subtle in a way that the principal sets weren’t). 

“I’ll wear this one.” The feel of the Ring resizing is queer, and he shivers and sweeps up its sisters before his father can even try and persuade him to leave them behind. He knew who most of his Guardians were, now; he was missing a Storm, and either a Sun or a Lightning, depending on Niccola’s preferences. “And I didn’t _hear_ anything. I dreamed of the Estraneo cannibalising their children, Papa. I don’t think they have many left …” 

His father’s face goes a shade of grey that makes him panic, just a little bit. If he died now - he wasn’t ready for him to die. He flares his Flames, high and a little panicky to attract attention, then wraps them tightly around his Papa, and _Wills_. (He almost wishes for the Sun Secondary everyone assumed he had in the dreams. He was sure he was more Cloudy than anything else.) 

A vague impulse drives him to slip their Family Ring (the one Papa _should_ be wearing, even given everything) onto the opposite hand to the one with his Papa’s wedding band, and then his Zios are there, with one of the house-Suns and he’s being led out of the office to let them work. 

He feels the burst of Flames, first from the Sun and then his Papa and the Ring, and his Zios’ sluggish Flames ignite, too … so he could breathe a sigh of relief for the minute; his Papa’s Flames were too steady for him to be at risk of slipping away. (Conveniently, it did mean everyone was distracted, though, so he could hunt down Romario and Niccola before someone thought to confiscate the Rings he’d _swiped_.)


End file.
